Senior Director, Real-World Data Operations Lead

Rewards

The Senior Director, RWD Operations Lead at Lilly is offered a competitive salary range of $169,500 - $248,600 per year, commensurate with experience.

Responsibilities

• RWD Operational Excellence & Data Readiness:
  • Technical and data integrity evaluation of raw RWD prior to acceptance and licensing.
  • Ensuring fitness-for-use, completeness, standardization, structure, and alignment with enterprise needs.
  • Ensuring all documentation is sufficient and centralized.
• Collaborate closely with RWD architect(s) and engineer(s) to translate scientific needs and intent into enterprise RWD infrastructure strategy and specifications.
• Resolving pipeline bottlenecks and ensuring documentation meets operational standards (SAPs, data dictionaries, audit trails).
• Accelerate evidence generation by standardizing and transforming raw data into reusable, analysis-ready assets across different business units.
• Develop, execute, document quality-control frameworks that qualify data completeness and ensure consistent, reliable RWD operations at scale.
• Lead with forward-thinking mindset to incorporate strategic innovation (AI) into RWD ecosystem operations.
• Standardization of Coding Systems & Reusable RWD Assets:
  • Own end-to-end code list standardization, maintenance, stewardship, and hosting (e.g., ontology specifications, procedure codes, and medication codes incl. ICD-10-CM, ICD-9, SNOMED-CT NDC, CPT/HCPC, LOINC, RxNorm).
  • Lead development and maintenance of reusable phenotyping algorithms, code libraries, and standardized data pipelines and modular code to accelerate study startup.
  • Establish governance and documentation standards for RWD asset reuse across functions.
• Governance & Cross-Functional Operations Management:
  • Operate with a research mindset to support building analytical, flexible TA-specific cohorts to support fast and consistent research.
  • Support organizational change by clarifying new operational roles, interfaces, and future-state workflows.
• RWD Portfolio & Workflow Visibility Tools:
  • Build tools and dashboards enabling stakeholders to gain rapid visibility into RWD sources – quality and density structures, limitations, and operational metadata.
  • Collaborate with RWD Strategy Lead to ensure visibility into current RWD assets and pairing with RWD/RWE studies and queries to inform prioritization and resource planning for data acquisition.
• Training, Documentation, & Capability Building:
  • Develop and deliver RWD-source-specific trainings to ensure scientific, technical, and operational teams understand the structure, quality, and limitations of each asset.
  • Maintain and evolve documentation across pipelines, datasets, reusable components, and operational standards.

Qualifications

• Masters degree (MS, MPH, PharmD, PhD) in a quantitative, data, or health-related field.
• Minimum of 3 years of RWD hands-on experience with: Healthcare data structures (claims, EHR, and multi-modal RWD, including linked clinical-genomic/omics datasets).
• Minimum of 3 years experience of RWD Healthcare coding systems: ICD-10, CPT, NDC, LOINC, RxNorm.
• Experience driving alignment and conflict resolution across technical and scientific teams.
• Experience supporting organizational change and building operational frameworks.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex operational workflows across multiple stakeholders.
• Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills.
• Strong strategic thinker at enterprise level and ability to collaborate with RWD architect, engineer, and strategy roles.
• Ability to influence stakeholders to resolve conflicts.
• Ability to establish external partnerships.
• Proficiency in SQL, R, and R-Shiny, including dashboarding and operational tool development.
• Familiarity with HEOR, medical, and statistical research workflows, including specification development, data quality assessment, study execution.
• Minimum of 2 years of direct people management experience, including leading, coaching, and developing team members preferred.